In IT decision making, the core stakeholder of a business system is typically the business function. The finance department selects the finance system, the human resources department selects the HR system, and so on. Downstream from these decisions, regular employees are then frequently confronted with Byzantine systems.

This issue is particularly pronounced for hourly workers, who are rarely considered when building and investing in work systems. At many large and midsize companies, hourly workers use a variety of non-intuitive legacy systems to perform functions like submitting timesheets, scheduling shifts, and looking up inventory.

The business challenge of integrating hourly workers

Hourly employees are usually the most underfunded in terms of IT spend, but often present the highest case for IT return on investment. It typically takes over a week to train an hourly employee in the systems and processes for their job, which quickly adds up when you factor in seasonal employment and typically high turnover. Once an hourly employee is on board, retention quickly becomes an issue, too: A recent study by Unisys of 12,000 workers showed that workers at companies considered to be technology laggards were 450% more likely to want to work at a different company.

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From federated identity to consolidated identity: a look at the past, present and futureThu, 24 May 2018 09:59:00 -0700Peter YaredPeter Yared

Today, it is common to use your Google, LinkedIn, or Facebook identity to log into a website. However, in the first generation of the commercial Internet, this was not the standard experience. Virtually every internet service required users to create an account with a username and password. For services that were only used occasionally, having to create this account and remember all the associated passwords often created friction for new users.

The invention of federated identity for the consumer Internet

I worked for Sun Microsystems in the early 2000s and was fortunate enough to be the technical lead for a new concept called federated identity, which presented a way for separate online entities to share identity across any number of websites. In order to build it, Sun formed the Liberty Alliance, a consortium of large companies from a variety of sectors, ranging from telecom to travel to banking.